Category Archives: Reflection

Presbyterian Government And American Government — The Same Only Different

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It is common among American Presbyterians, when trying to explain our system of Presbyterian Government, to appeal to the structure of our Federal government to help explain how we do things.  This is for good reason because the two governmental systems have strong similarities in their elected representative forms, the presence of checks and balances, and the appearance of different branches of government.  The parallels are not coincidental — while it is often said that the U.S. Government was patterned on the Presbyterian system, several authorities I have consulted prefer to say that the two systems developed at the same time in the same cultural and philosophical climate.

It can not be denied that there is a strong tie between the two.  James Madison was one of the most influential members of the 1787 Constitutional Convention, possibly the individual having the greatest single influence on the government structure in the Constitution.  He was also a graduate of the Presbyterian College of New Jersey, now Princeton University, and following his graduation in 1771 he remained there for another year or two as he studied with the college president, the Rev. John Witherspoon, who had recently arrived from Scotland to serve as the college’s sixth president.  While Madison himself seems to have affiliated with the Episcopal Church, his education clearly included heavy influence by Presbyterians.  (For reference regarding timing, the Presbyterians instituted multiple synods and brought them together in the first General Assembly in 1789 in Philadelphia.)

However, while I have used the analogy between the Presbyterian and American systems of government in the past I have moved away from that because the differences between them are just as important to our polity as the similarities.

One of the big differences is that Presbyterianism is a different sort of representative government.  When a teaching or ruling elder participates in the deliberations of a governing body they may be there as the representatives of the members that elected them to that position, but they are not there to represent the views of those people.  The Presbyterian church is not a democracy or a republic, it is a theocracy.  The very first thing the PC(USA) Book of Order says is:

All power in heaven and earth is given to Jesus Christ by Almighty God, who raised Christ from the dead and set him above all rule and authority, all power and dominion, and every name that is named, not only in this age but also in that which is to come. God has put all things under the Lordship of Jesus Christ and has made Christ Head of the Church, which is his body. [G-1.0100a]

And lest you think they are alone the PCA Book of Church Order begins in a very similar way.  Jesus Christ is the Head of the Church and those in governing bodies are there to seek God’s will and do it, not to follow the opinion of the people.  I would first note that this Book of Order section is a constant reminder to me of what the purpose of church government is and this probably explains why I really don’t like that the new revised PC(USA) Form of Government has moved this away from the opening lines of the Foundations section.  My second note here is to clarify that I am not saying that the opinions and views of those we represent are not important — they are very important.  But they need to be considered as part of the discernment process and possibly held in tension with the leading of the Holy Spirit.  As the Book of Order says “Presbyters are not simply to reflect the will of the people, but rather to seek together to find and represent the will of Christ.” [G-4.0301d]

Maybe the most serious error frequently made in trying to explain Presbyterian government is to describe it as having three branches like the Federal system.  It is tempting to equate the full Assembly as a legislative branch, the judicial commission as the judicial branch, and an executive as the executive branch.  The truth is that a Presbyterian governing body has only one branch and that is the body itself.  We have single bodies which are mostly legislative, or deliberative, and the executive or judicial functions exist not to be branches in their own right but as parts of the governing body to assist the body in carrying out its mission.  Not to put too fine a point on this, but remember that judicial commissions are just that – commissions.  They are empowered or commissioned to act on behalf of the governing body with the full authority of the governing body, within the limits specificed by the governing body.  A commission is an extension of the body to do a particular job, not a separate body.

And this brings me to a third difference, the system of checks and balances.  In the Federal system the primary system of checks and balances is between the three coequal branches of the U.S. government.  Another system of checks and balances exists between the Federal government and the state governments but how strong a system of checks that should be is a matter of discussion by constitutional scholars.  In the connectional Presbyterian system the checks and balances are in “governing bodies (traditionally called judicatories or courts) in regular gradation.” [G-4.0301c]  Our governing bodies are not independent but each sends representatives to the higher one and each higher one has the responsibility of review on the lower ones.  Governing bodies are not independent and autonomous but have come together to be the Body of Christ together in this time and place.

And so, on this 234th anniversary of the Rev. Witherspoon and his fellow delegates to the Continental Congress affixing their signatures to the Declaration of Independence, with a Presbyterian General Assembly underway, we acknowledge the deep connections in history and philosophy the two systems of government share. But we also recognize that these two governments have two different purposes and serve two different ends and so there are also structural and philosophical differences between the two reflecting how their purposes diverge.

So where every American Presbyterians find themselves today, be it in Minneapolis or somewhere else, have a very good Fourth of July.

Liturgy — One Reason We Have It

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On Friday I was one of many bloggers that linked to a video that, in my opinion, provided a very insightful parody of contemporary worship and demonstrated so clearly the liturgy inherent in the worship style.

Last Sunday I had an experience that very clearly points out one of the reasons and values of a liturgy.

Last Sunday for the first time in quite a while I helped take communion to one of our members who has trouble making it to church on Sunday morning for medical reasons.  A while back I was regularly part of the team that took communion to them and then, with a change in their circumstances, they were able to attend regularly for a period.  Unfortunately, they have again had their mobility restricted.

During the earlier period of visitation I would regularly use the worship/communion liturgy from the Book of Common Worship and my preferred Great Thanksgiving that has as the core of its central portion the Sanctus.  As we were setting up for communion last Sunday our friend specifically referenced the earlier period and how meaningful it was to them to have the section with the “Holy, Holy, Holy” in the communion service.

Liturgy serves many purposes among which is the repetition that works its way into our memory to provide a sense of reverence, remembrance, and familiarity.  It really is a “Do this in Remembrance of Me” sort of thing.

The Church In The Current Culture — Insights From Other Areas

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As regular readers are well aware one of my interests is noting commentaries on the current culture and cultural indicators and “overlaying” that on the church to see what that means for our ecclesiology.

A couple of weeks ago I attended the Theology After Google conference at the Claremont School of Theology.  This conference, organized by Philip Clayton and Tripp Fuller, has drawn a bit of controversy for its emphasis on “progressive” and “emergent” theology.  Yes, that was clearly there but my interest was on the technology and the concept of “returning theological discussion to the people,” which in my view is “platform independent” and need not be automatically associated with a theological viewpoint.  Anyway, more on that another time.

But in the spirit of this concept of taking culture and holding it up against the Church I heard some fascinating bits on the radio program “This American Life” last Saturday (3/27). The program was about NUMMI (New United Motor Manufacturing Incorporated), a joint Toyota/GM venture in Fremont, California, which began in 1984.  GM pulled out of the venture in 2009 when it filed for bankruptcy and now Toyota is ending its part of the project with the last vehicle, a Corolla, rolling off the assembly line today (Today’s NPR story).  And there is a Presbyterian connection to this story:  The Rev. Bruce Reyes-Chow, Moderator of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) and pastor of Mission Bay Community Church in San Francisco was the religious representative on a California state commission that issued a report regarding the shut down and traveled to Japan to call attention to the closure and meet with Toyota officials.

The piece is interesting and tells the story with the voices of those at the center of the rise of the plant and the attempts to reproduce it elsewhere.  Here are some quotes from the story.  As you read them instead of thinking about a commercial enterprize or a manufacturing plant, substitute the mainline church in there:

“Why hasn’t GM got it yet?  It’s not like this reliability problem snuck up on them — It’s been fifty years since it started losing market share.  Fifty years since it began the slide from holding over half the U.S. car market in the 1960’s to just 22% today.”  (Ira Glass, program host)

“I think there was pride (pause) and defensiveness. ‘I’m proud because I’m the biggest auto maker in the world. I’ve been the best, I’ve dominated the market.  You can’t teach me anything you little Japanese company.’ ” (Jeffrey Liker, author of The Toyota Way, talking about why GM senior management was not completely accepting of the fact that Toyota was building better quality cars in the early 80’s.)

“The key to the Toyota production system was a principle so basic it sounds like an empty management slogan — ‘Team work.’  Back home in Fremont GM supervisors ordered around large groups of workers.  At the [Japanese] plant people were divided into teams of just four or five, switched jobs every few hours to relieve the monotony.  And a team leader would step in to help whenever anything went wrong.” (Frank Langfitt, reporter)

“There were too many people convinced that they didn’t need to have to change. (reporter asks why?) It’s not logical. They just didn’t.” (Larry Spiegel, GM mid-level management who tried to help implement the NUMMI model at another GM plant.)

“This was one of the biggest differences between Fremont and Van Nuys — Van Nuys hadn’t been shut down.  It turns out it’s a lot easier to get workers to change if they’ve lost their jobs and then you offer them back.  Without that many union members just saw the Toyota system as a threat.”  (Frank Langfitt, reporter)

“At Van Nuys it wasn’t just union members that resisted the Japanese system. Managers didn’t like it either — they had their own privileges to protect…. Their bonuses depended on the number of cars that rolled off [the assembly line], never mind how many defects they had.” (Frank Langfitt, reporter)

“Workers could only build cars as good as the parts they were given.  At NUMMI many of the parts came from Japan and were really good.  At Van Nuys it was totally different.” (Frank Langfitt, reporter)

“You had asked the question earlier ‘what’s different when you walk into the NUMMI plant?’ Well you can see a lot of things different, but the one thing you don’t see is the system that supports the NUMMI plant.” (Ernie Schaefer, Van Nuys plant manager)

“[Toyota] never prohibited us from walking through the plant, understanding, even asking questions of some of the key people.  I’ve often puzzled over that, why they did that.  And I think they recognized is that we were asking all the wrong questions.  We didn’t understand the bigger picture thing.  All of our questions were focused on the floor of the assembly plant, what’s happening on the line.  That’s not the real issue.  The real issue is ‘How do you support that system with all the other functions that take place in the organization?’ ” (Ernie Schaefer, Van Nuys plant manager)

“One reason car execs were in denial was Detroit’s insular culture… [E]veryone had settled into comfortable roles in this dysfunctional system and learned to live with it.  And in the late 1980’s, with their market share in free fall, Jeffrey Liker says they were more apt to blame others than themselves.”  (Frank Langfitt, reporter)

“Jeffrey Liker says the cultural gap between NUMMI and the rest of GM was so vast that even with clear marching orders to change some of the people running the company didn’t know where to begin.”  (Frank Langfitt, reporter)

“We had some tough goes in some of our facilities where we spent more time trying to convince the plant leadership versus going on and actually doing the implementation.  I was actually asked in one plant to leave because they were not interested in what I had to sell.” (Goeff Weller, GM manager in charge of converting plants to the Japanese system)

This is not to advocate for change for changes sake, or to say that implicitly “new is better.”  It is interesting to consider how we do things, how the organization – be it the congregation, presbytery, synod, or national level – can change and support other changes that are happening.  How do we work together – top down or bottom up?  Is our measure of success quality or quantity?  Do we view ourselves as “too big to fail?”  I love the quote about it being easier to get people to agree to change if the institution has been shut down and their are trying to begin again differently.

There is a lot to think about in there.  And this piece did get the attention of another Presbyterian commentator – Jan Edmiston at A Church for Starving Artists.

Let me finish with a much shorter piece that aired one week earlier (3/20) on NPR’s Weekend Edition about military recruiting and how the Millennial Generation differs from earlier ones.  This was an interview with Lt. Gen. Mark Hertling, the commander in charge of basic training, and is titled “New Basic Training Hardens ‘Softer Generation’.”  He says this about today’s recruit:

We also have really found a new generation of soldiers, what some may call the millennial generation, who are advanced in terms of their use of technology, and maybe not as advanced in their physical capabilities or ability to go into a fight.

and

I think we are seeing a decline, across the board, in America. And in fact, it concerns many of us in the military, and we’re watching it very closely. This isn’t a decline in our recruits; this is a decline in our American society in terms of their physical capacity. It’s just a softer generation. But we can’t afford to accept that.

and

They’re different. They have a technology edge. I think they’re smarter than any generation we’ve ever had before.

They certainly ask a lot more difficult questions. They team differently. They have loyalty and – but I think the most important thing about this generation, this generation of millennials, as I said we call it, is the fact that they want to change the world. They want to contribute to something that’s bigger than themselves.

It sounds a lot like other assessments and descriptions of the millennial generation that we are hearing and experiencing in the church.  Now how do we adapt the church, like the military is working on adapting, without compromising our mission or message?

God’s Love Made Visible

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Believe it or not, this is a General Assembly post…

Back in 1997 I was a commissioner to the 209th General Assembly of the PC(USA).  The outgoing Moderator of the 208th GA, the Rev. John Buchanan, arranged for jazz musician and composer Dave Brubeck to lead a performance of his Christmas choral piece La Fiesta de la Posada one evening. (Yes, this was in June.)  It was a great break from the intense business of a GA.  Furthermore, while the whole piece was inspiring, one of the sections in particular, “God’s Love Made Visible,” really moved me in the unity of the words and music, it has stuck with me for these 12 years, and listening to the CD is now part of my regular Christmas discipline.  So on this day of the celebration of the Incarnation, I give you the opening of “God’s Love Made Visible”:

God’s love made visible!
Incomprehensible!
He is invincible,
His love shall reign!

From love so bountiful,
blessings uncountable,
make death surmountable.
His love shall reign!

The Lectionary – Border, Bastion, Or Barrier?

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Happy New Year – kind-a, sort of, maybe…

Yes, a week ago last Sunday was the first Sunday of the Advent Season and the churches that follow the liturgical calendar moved from Year B to Year C of the lectionary.

Now, I will simply recognize that liturgical calendars and seasons, particularly Advent and Christmas, are not unanimously accepted by those of us in the Reformed and Presbyterian stream.  In fact, the Directory for the Publick Worship of God adopted by the Kirk and Parliament of Scotland in 1645 says in the Appendix “Festival days, vulgarly called Holy-days, having no warrant in the word of God, are not to be continued.” (For more you can check out an interesting article on Christmas , a detailed piece on Holy days in American Presbyterianism, a current series of pieces at Building Old School Churches, or the Wikipedia entry for Christmas. There is also a current piece by Mark Horne making the case that there is Reformed support for celebrating Christmas.)

On a personal note, I appreciate the application of the regulative principle and the fact that there are non-Christian influences and origins of the celebrations of Advent, Christmas and Easter that argue against the celebration of specific Holy days.  However, I also find spiritual focus in the seasons and feasts of the old covenant as applied to the Christian liturgical year and the celebration of special days.  Back to this in a moment.

As I mentioned at the beginning, we have begun a new year in the lectionary which provides weekly scripture passages for worship on the Lord’s Day.  I was reflecting on this because there does seem to be an association between the use of the lectionary and the “DNA” of a particular Presbyterian branch.  But as I reflected on it more and how it impacts our worship it seemed to me that the lectionary has certain benefits, but also certain limitations, in its use.  It seems important to understand each of these and how they impact our community life.  And it should go without saying that it impacts the “true preaching of the word of God.”

In most mainline congregations it seems that the Revised Common Lectionary is the default position.  In a couple of respects this is the “bastion” or “safe” approach.  In one respect it is safe because it guides a congregation through the three-year cycle of scripture readings providing broad, though hardly complete, coverage of the Bible appropriate to the liturgical season. (My friend David Gambrell over at Linen Ephod has a nice summary of each lectionary year.)  It also provides a ready defense for a preacher when a congregant did not like text for that day — all you have to say is “that is the lectionary text for today.”   

The lectionary also provides a “paring” of scripture passages from the three sections and these selections are supposed to relate to each other.  (Sometimes it is tough to see the relationship, other times you can probably think of a better pairing.) Some preachers will include two or more readings and then expound on all of them in the sermon, some will only chose one to preach on.  In the lectionary there is also the annual rhythm in the reading that takes us through the life and ministry of Jesus Christ and “tells us the story” repeated every year.  And I am told that by having congregations use a common lectionary it gives pastors something to talk about when they get together.

But one of the biggest practical benefits of the lectionary is that it keeps a preacher from falling into the pattern or habit of preaching on what they want to preach on.  In this way the lectionary acts as a “border,” “fence,” or “hedge” around the preaching.  It works as a tool to keep from always hearing a message based on the pastor’s favorite scripture passage or selecting texts that simply provide another avenue for the pastor to once again advocate their favorite theme or message.  In fact, by using the lectionary a conscientious preacher can work the three weekly readings (Old Testament, New Testament and Gospel) into nine years of distinctly different sermons.  (Twelve years worth if you include the weekly Psalm as a unique sermon, but from what I have seen most pastors use the Psalm as a supporting text to the primary text that they preach on.)

Now, to be clear, I don’t have a fundamental objection to a well planned and executed sermon series that is outside the lectionary.  My own church has done a couple of very effective ones including the series last year of preaching through the Lord’s Prayer one phrase at a time.  When properly done this style does have the elements of the “true preaching of the word of God” in my understanding.

Where the “free-form” approach is dangerous is when it is not implemented with any long-term plan or accountability – especially when a pastor just spends the week deciding what to preach on and choosing relevant passages to base it on as they go.  That is, they let the sermon drive the texts that will be used.  One of the best sermons I have ever heard preached at a General Assembly was delivered by the Rev. James Costen titled “The problem of deferred maintenance” and addressed the Great End of the Church of The Maintenance of Divine Worship.  In that sermon he spoke of a variety of sermon that he called “Saturday Night Specials” that he said could be just as deadly as the street firearm variety.  An interim pastor I once had took this to the extreme when we would regularly find him in his office Sunday morning writing out the sermon.  Again, I know of cases where the Holy Spirit has led preachers to completely rewrite their messages at the last moment and I have no problem with that.  But to regularly write the sermon like that I believe does a disservice to the preaching of the word.

So on the one hand the lectionary provides a framework to help pastors preach through scripture in an organized and systematic manner while letting scripture have its way with us rather than the other way around.  But there are limitations on the other side as well.  If you and you preacher have both been there over nine years you might begin hearing the same things again.  Or if the pastor is not systematic you could hear them again in three.  And even with good planning, there will come a point where the cycle begins repeating itself.  You young’uns may not have been through too many cycles but I’ll admit to being old enough to have been through over 15 lectionary cycles (although the Revised Common Lectionary is not as old as I am having a first version in 1983 and the Revised version in 1992).

So the lectionary will still lead to repetition given enough time.  Some may argue that the repetition is good, that it reinforces important passages of scripture.  But instead
of repeating, what if you were to cover passages of scripture that have not been preached on yet – passages that are not included in the lectionary?

I have not found detailed statistics for the Revised Common Lectionary, but there is a great page that gives the statistics for the Roman Lectionary, which the RCL is based upon, concerning how much of the Bible is covered.  It turns out that of the Roman Lectionary covers only 3.7% of the Old Testament of the Catholic Bible and 40.8% of the New Testament.  If you consider the Scripture to Lectionary cross-index for the RCL is quickly becomes apparent that of the 66 books in the Protestant Bible, several (17 by my count) are used only once or twice and 8 are never used — there will be no lectionary reading from I or II Chronicles, Ezra, Nahum, Obadiah, II or III John or Jude.

Now, I’m sure some of you are saying “of course not everything can be covered on Sunday morning, that is what personal Scripture reading is for.”  I do not dispute the importance of regular Bible reading for personal study and I recommend that every Christian have a plan to read or hear the complete Bible in a one or two year cycle.  But my focus is “the true preaching of the word of God.”  Is it a problem that some of the word is never preached if you use the lectionary?  Has the lectionary become a “barrier” to hearing some sections of scripture preached?

It is here that I am beginning to have a appreciation for congregations that instead of using the lectionary make it their practice to systematically preach through individual books of the Bible.  The congregation hears large sections, at least chapter length, read through in sequence from week to week.  And while every single verse is not necessarily touched on in the preaching, a regular, sequential set of sermons allow for the development of the word in the order recorded.

I don’t know how many preachers would consider the lack of coverage of the RCL a problem and that a solution is necessary.  But if you do, here are a couple of different approaches to this.

One is of course multiple services per week.  If the word is preached three times a week (Sunday morning, Sunday evening, Wednesday evening) a preacher, or preaching team, could cover three times as much territory.

Another approach is to make the lectionary cycle longer and include everything.  For the 1189 chapters in the Bible that could be covered in 22.8 years if one chapter is covered every Sunday morning.  Preaching multiple chapters per week – either multiple services, larger pieces (two chapters say), or pairing OT and NT passages in a sermon would shorten the cycle.

But here is my modest proposal for an “extended lectionary.”  This would not necessarily be tied to a liturgical year and therefore precise order would not be important.  However, since the Gospels are the heart of the Bible for Christians, I would suggest that one is Gospel is preached in its entirety each calendar year.  That would set up a four year cycle with between 16 and 28 weeks each year in a contiguous block being taken up for the Gospel reading and direct preaching.  Considering the Psalms the worship book of the Bible, I would suggest they be included each week as a second scripture passage that is read or sung by the congregation.  That leaves 941 chapters of Scripture that when preached at one chapter per week, and working around the regular reading and preaching of the Gospels, would take about 34 years to cover.  That is about one generation to cover the preaching of the whole Bible, and then a congregation would start over again.

Well, its an idea anyway.  Do you have a better one to systematically cover the whole Bible?  (And yes, systematic preaching 3 times per week would pull that down to less than a decade to complete the cycle.)

But getting back to the central idea of this commentary, as we start a new lectionary year I simply wanted to review the benefits and the draw-backs of the use of the lectionary.  There is a tension between the order and fence provided by the use of the lectionary that helps to keep us from having our way with the holy word.  On the other hand, this border is narrow and only covers a small part of the Scriptures possibly presenting a barrier to preaching more of God’s word. It raises the question “if we only cover 12.6% of the volume of Scripture in three years cycles and then start over again, is that the ‘true preaching of the word of God’?”

The Value Of A Contrary Opinion

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I have wondered aloud, or at least in print, in the past about what I see as a fundamentally Presbyterian and Reformed trait when it comes to our polity — The tendency for us Reformed folk to hold, accept (or at least tolerate), and act upon divergent views on issues major and minor.  We seem to do this “better” than other religious branches that I have looked at.  In fact the PC(USA) enshrines it in our polity:

G-1.030(1) (a) That “God alone is Lord of the conscience, and hath left it free from the doctrines and commandments of men which are in anything contrary to his Word, or beside it, in matters of faith or worship.”

(b) Therefore we consider the rights of private judgment, in all matters that respect religion, as universal and unalienable: We do not even wish to see any religious constitution aided by the civil power, further than may be necessary for protection and security, and at the same time, be equal and common to all others.

(2) That, in perfect consistency with the above principle of common right, every Christian Church, or union or association of particular churches, is entitled to declare the terms of admission into its communion, and the qualifications of its ministers and members, as well as the whole system of its internal government which Christ hath appointed; that in the exercise of this right they may, notwithstanding, err, in making the terms of communion either too lax or too narrow; yet, even in this case, they do not infringe upon the liberty or the rights of others, but only make an improper use of their own.

And our parliamentary procedure is based upon certain principles (thanks to Paul McClintock, RPR, for the quote):

There are five great principles underlying the rules of parliamentary law, namely: (1) Order. That is, there must be orderly procedure. (2) Equality. That is, all members are equal before the rule or law. (3) Justice. That is, justice for all. (4) Right of the minority to be heard on questions. (5) Right of the majority to rule the organization. — George Demeter, Demeter’s Manual of Parliamentary Law and Procedure, 1969 Blue Book Edition, p. 5. [emphasis mine]

In a future reflection I will argue that this majority-minority interplay in our governing bodies is in fact what underlies our deliberative process and makes it so powerful — it is the key to our “always being reformed according to the word of God.”

But what has struck me this week is how this process has significant similarities to the way that science progresses with its “multiple working hypotheses” to explain the data and as new data is collected hypotheses are tested and may be revised or discarded in favor of alternate hypotheses which better explain the observations.  It is also a discernment process where dissenting voices must be considered because they bring into focus alternative perspectives on data interpretation.

This has been on my mind this week as I read about the e-mails and documents obtained by hackers from the computers at the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia and posted on public servers. (news story, CRU response)  Some of the material contained in those e-mails could be interpreted as attempts by climate researchers to suppress the publication of research that does not support the “consensus position.”  (Today NPR had an interesting story about the controversy where one of the scientists they interview is a researcher who feels he was suppressed because his research shows more extreme warming than the “consensus position.” )  I have not yet looked into this controversy in enough detail to have formed a final opinion.  I am suspicious that only the most sensational quotes are being used in the mainstream media reporting.  However, what I have read does concern me.

An interesting thing about this is that one of the central figures is Dr. Michael Mann of the Earth System Science Center of the College of Earth and Mineral Sciences at the Pennsylvania State University.  I bring this specific case up because while a student in the Geosciences Department there at PSU I had a formative experience that reinforced the role that contrary opinion plays in science, a lesson that I regularly remember up to the present day.

I began my undergraduate career at the tail end of the time of the paradigm shift resulting from the wide acceptance of the theory of plate tectonics.  (That in itself is a major century-long story of theory, data, the scientific method and the role that personality cults can play.  If you want to hear that one you’ll have to sit in on the two lectures where I cover that in the earthquakes class I teach.)  I have to admit that I don’t remember many of the speakers or talks I attended while at PSU, but I clearly remember a fascinating presentation given by Prof. MacKenzie “Mac” Keith.  In this presentation he presented alternate ways that certain features attributed to plate tectonics could have been generated.  While I was a bit skeptical at the time, and today am confident his theories don’t do the best job of explaining the data, it was reinforced on my developing scientific mind that alternate explanations must be considered, at least long enough to understand why they are less favorable.

So I don’t know how this climate change controversy will turn out, but I am forever grateful to Dr. Keith for the lesson in science, and life, that he taught in that one evening’s presentation.

All Saints Day 2009

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Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight and the sin that clings so closely, and let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus the pioneer and perfecter of our faith, who for the sake of the joy that was set before him endured the cross, disregarding its shame, and has taken his seat at the right hand of the throne of God.  [Hebrews 12:1-2]

As is my custom every year on November 1 in my daily devotions I give thanks for those that have touched my life and who have joined the Church Triumphant in the past year.

On this Feast ( or Commemoration or Solemnity ) of All Saints I remember the saints that I have known.  Those whose life was an inspiration to me in some way and have now gone on to their heavenly reward.  I am grateful for the way they have touched my life, inspired me, and enriched my faith.

This year I remember…

  • Marjorie – who sat behind me in church every Sunday, was so quick to offer me the handshake of Peace, and who was almost never without a smile.
  • Bob – a gentleman (in the best sense of the word) who had seen much in his many years and was so faithful in attendance to church and family as his strength allowed.
  • Stan – who struggled with illness and other issues for years and now finds his rest with God.
  • Ken – who regularly shared his musical talents as a member of our church choir and went to be with the Lord at much too early an age.
  • Billie – who was quiet but faithful and encouraging.

As I look back on the year I am struck by two interesting aspects.  The first is how many around me in the Church Militant have struggled with health issues, particularly cancer, and who have to date been weakened and injured by the illness but who have prevailed against it so far.  The second is the number of infants in our church family, newborn and unborn, that have departed this world and we trust, through God’s steadfast love, now reside in his care.

So to all the saints that have inspired me and encouraged me in my own race, thanks and I am sure that you have heard from the Lord “well done, good and faithful servant.”

O blest communion, fellowship divine
We feebly struggle, they in glory shine;
Yet all are one in Thee, for all are Thine.
Alleluia!  Alleluia!

What Changed In The Sixties? The Implications For The Mainline

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OK, this is one of those “critical mass” posts I do — I’ve got a bunch of stuff in my notes and suddenly something brings it all together.

This time the “something” is a great Religious News Service article “40 Years Later, Woodstock’s Spiritual Vibes Still Resonate” by Steve Rabey. (H/T GetReligion)  In the article, the symbolism of Woodstock can be best presented with these paragraphs:

[Rock historian Pete] Fornatale sees the festival as a massive communion ceremony featuring drugs as sacramental substances, hymns like “Amazing Grace” and “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” performed by Arlo Guthrie and Joan Baez, sermons by musical prophets like Sylvester Stewart of Sly and the Family Stone, and a modern-day re-enactment of Jesus’ miracle of the loaves and fishes exhibited in the communal ethos of festival-goers who shared food with “brothers and sisters” who were hungry.

And the conclusion of the article, that Woodstock marked a shift from “religion to spirituality,” would be summed up in this quote:

“There was a pervasive shift from the theological to the therapeutic,” said [Don] Lattin, author of “Following Our Bliss: How the Spiritual Ideals of the Sixties Shape Our Lives Today.” “It was all about feeling good rather than being good. It was about stress reduction, not salvation.”

Today, the legacy of Esalen can be found at “seeker-sensitive” churches that market to congregants based on their felt needs and Catholic retreat centers that offer sessions on yoga, meditation and the Enneagram.

And don’t miss the interesting twist that Woodstock was held near the town of Bethel, N.Y., a Hebrew word meaning “House of God.”

It has struck me, and the article mentions, how certain religious songs have been incorporated by the culture and in the process losing their strong religious meaning.  Amazing Grace may be the hymn most integrated into American culture. Over 20 years ago at an international meeting in Europe I got into a group discussion about the song (no relation to the meeting subject of European and Mediterranean earthquakes) and one of my European colleagues called Amazing Grace “America’s unofficial national anthem.”  So even though it was written by an English minister, it has come to be associated with American culture.

While I have not read the book Amazing Grace: The Story of America’s Most Beloved Song by Steve Turner, a review of the book does talk about the song’s dissemination into American culture first in the Second Great Awakening, then with the early 20th Century revivals by preachers such as Dwight Moody, and finally it pin-points the transition to pop-folk popularity a bit before Woodstock.

Note the characteristics that make the song so accessible, even by the non-religious:  It has a great “back story” about John Newton’s conversion from slave trader to minister.  I have heard that story many times, not just in sermons but at folk concerts and social justice meetings and rallies.  But in secular settings they do seem to leave off the fact that it was a religious conversion experience and he became a minister.  Note also the lack of references to God in the song.  You can sing four verses without referencing one of the members of the Trinity.  As people of faith we inherently read God into the Grace that the song is about.  Consider how differently a non-religious person would still sing about grace, but with a completely different perception of the grace it talks about.  (I once saw a promotional item put out by a major soap company — It was a waterproof songbook for use in the shower that included Amazing Grace, but did not include verses that mentioned God.)  And the simplicity and sing-ability of the common tune certainly help as well.

However, I would comment that Amazing Grace is not the first religious song to find a mostly secular following or application.  A century earlier the Battle Hymn of the Republic became a Civil War rallying song and it continues today to appear in non-religious settings.  While packed with sacred imagery, imagery regularly used by the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., in his sermons, in the song the references to God are mostly minimized by the use of the pronouns “He” or “His.”  And there is no question that the tune is catchy — Julia Ward Howe wrote the lyrics after hearing the popular tune.  (Although it can be legitimately argued that Howe never intended it’s primary use to be in religious services despite the imagery.)

Regarding music in the sixties it is also interesting to note the rise of CCM (contemporary Christian music) at about this time as well.  As much as revivals had previously made use of popular and catchy words and music, there was now the shift in instrumentation to guitars and drums.  In fact, in the spirit of the “religion to spirituality” shift, CCM artist Scott Wesley Brown even has a 1976 song “I’m not religious, I just love the Lord.”

I find it hard to separate societal events like Woodstock from religious “Sixties Things” like the writing and adoption of the Confession of 1967 by the UPCUSA.  By itself, this confession was viewed by many as a step towards liberalism.  As Hart and Muether say in one of their Presbyterian history articles:

…Cornelius Van Til, took the Confession of 1967 as proof of his charge (made in a 1946 book) that the theology of Karl Barth had infiltrated the PCUSA as the “new modernism.” Indeed, neo-orthodoxy had proved to be more triumphant in the Presbyterian Church than liberalism. Liberalism undermined the church’s confidence in the Westminster standards, but never to the point of crafting a new confession. However, the largely Barthian Confession of 1967 entailed the rejection of the Westminster standards-and indeed of all that the historic Christian creeds affirmed.

Evangelical Barthians disagreed with this assessment. They charged that Van Til exaggerated the new confession’s Barthian roots. Geoffrey Bromiley of Fuller Seminary conceded that there were parallels to Barth’s theology. But upon closer inspection, he claimed, Barth’s teaching on Scripture and the Trinity was far more orthodox. Bromiley went on to argue that the Confession of 1967 accommodated itself to liberalism and Romanism in ways that Barth never did.

On the other side, Arnold B. Come writes this about the state of confessional standards in the Journal of Presbyterian History:

James H. Nichols has said that C-67 is necessary because “the Westminster Standards are obsolescent.” Hardly anyone could subscribe to them as “containing the system of doctrine taught in Scripture” (Christianity and Crisis, 17 May 1965, p. 108). For this reason, Brian Gerrish has noted, “retention of the Westminster Confession has encouraged—not hindered—doctrinal laxity. If the Presbyterian Church should persist in retaining the Confession…as the sole confessional norm, it will cease altogether to be a confessional church” (Christian Century, 4 May 1966, pp. 583f.). The adoption of the Book of Confessions reminds us that in contrast to the Lutherans, “the Reformed have never had a single pre-eminent statement of belief…nor a
closed symbolic collection…[but] has always been ‘open’—subject…to a policy of continuous revision and addition” (Gerrish, op. cit., p. 582). The Book also helps us to “break out of the provincialism of British Reformed tradition to the wider Reformed church…[and to] define common ground with Orthodox and Roman Catholic churches” (Nichols, op. cit., p. 109).

As the last quote points out, along with this one contemporary statement was the adoption of a Book of Confessions with multiple statements from across church history that now provided “guidance” and not “standards.”  While there is discussion over the value and effect of this move (some previous comments) it strikes me that parallels could be drawn to the RNS article’s comments concerning the shift from “religion to spirituality” and “the theological to the therapeutic.”  If nothing else, the UPCUSA traded a theological exactness for an historical perspective and diversity.

Let me finish with another transition — that of the “message to the medium.”  To put it bluntly there was the recognition that we wanted to be entertained.

Consider this comment in a New York Times op-ed piece by Paul Krugman:

In 1994 [technology guru] Esther Dyson, made a striking prediction: that the ease with which digital content can be copied and disseminated would eventually force businesses to sell the results of creative activity cheaply, or even give it away. Whatever the product — software, books, music, movies — the cost of creation would have to be recouped indirectly: businesses would have to “distribute intellectual property free in order to sell services and relationships.”

For example, she described how some software companies gave their product away but earned fees for installation and servicing. But her most compelling illustration of how you can make money by giving stuff away was that of the Grateful Dead, who encouraged people to tape live performances because “enough of the people who copy and listen to Grateful Dead tapes end up paying for hats, T-shirts and performance tickets. In the new era, the ancillary market is the market.” (emphasis added)

In other words, what the Grateful Dead knew back in the 60’s was that if given the content people would still pay to be entertained — the experience was more profitable than the material.  Whatever you might think of the Grateful Dead as a band, their business model was far ahead of its time.  Fast forward to today and the current situation.  On the secular side, you can purchase a song for download for 99 cents or look for it for free on a (probably illegal) peer-to-peer file sharing site.  On the sacred side churches provide their sermons as free podcasts and worship services at megachurches look like rock concerts with well-practiced musical groups and preachers as celebrities.  In fact, one of the characteristics of some seeker-sensitive worship services is that there is no audience participation.  It is expected that attendees will just show up and watch, not be participants in worship.  Throughout American history there have been revival meetings with great numbers of people.  But I’m not aware that the present trend of 10,000+ member individual churches has any parallel.

My discussion here is clearly not exhaustive, but in this year of looking back at the events of 1969, it is interesting to see how the secular culture and the religious culture moved in parallel ways with the change in American mind set.  The question of whether the culture is driving the church, or the church is changing so that it can faithfully minister in a new age is important, but a topic for another time.  But it is the Church’s job to be faithful to Jesus Christ while still speaking to the changing world around us.

Reflections On Corporate And Individual Salvation — It Is Not Either/Or But Both/And

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from Wikimedia Commons
 A couple of weeks ago the Rev. Katharine Jefferts Schori, the Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church, began a heated debate with these comments in her opening address to the Episcopal Church General Conference:

The overarching connection in all of these crises has to do with the great Western heresy – that we can be saved as individuals, that any of use alone can be in right relationship with God. It’s caricatured in some quarters by insisting that salvation depends on reciting a specific verbal formula about Jesus. That individualist focus is a form of idolatry, for it puts me and my words in the place that only God can occupy, at the center of existence, as the ground of all being.

This comment has been taken in many quarters to equate to the statement of Cyprian of Carthage:

Outside the Church there is no salvation

Part of the reason that this was taken negatively was that it seemed to be addressed at particular churches and dioceses that were departing from the Episcopal church and realigning in their own, new ecclesiastical structure.  For more on how this was taken within the Anglican world as an insult or threat you can check out comments from VirtueOnline, Anglican Curmudgeon, and Sydney Anglicans.  In the broader blogosphere there were comments, as much about the theology as the church politics, from Apprising Ministries, Internet Monk, and Bible Belt Blogger.  Maybe most notable were comments from two seminary presidents — Richard Mouw at Fuller and Albert Mohler at Southern Baptist.

The comments got me thinking both about confessional Christianity as well as the ecclesiastical relationship to salvation.  I’ll leave the former to another time and just address the latter now.

Let me state my thesis right at the beginning:  Based on my understanding of Scripture and Reformed thought this is not an either/or proposition but a both/and situation.  To put it in the simplest form — The Church is the bookends around individual salvation.

Part of the expressed concern is a long-standing theological tension that exists between individual salvation and corporate salvation.

On the individual side there is the ancient confession that “Jesus is Lord,” and the more modern tool – the Sinners Prayer.  As Dr. Mohler nicely points out in his piece, the mechanistic use of these formulae can be manipulative and gives a simplistic representation of the meaning and depth of salvation.  There is also concern for “Lone Ranger Christians” and the “Jesus and Me” situation, both of which are labeled heresies by some, where the only thing that matters is if a person has a right relationship with Jesus exclusive of the role other Christians play in that relationship.  All of this presents a simple view of the rich experience of Christianity.

On the other side is the belief that all you need to do to be a Christian is to jump through the hoops to become a member of the church.  The individual relationship with God is not what is important, but rather it is the relationship in the community — fidelity to the teachings of the church and participation in its sacraments.  You are saved by being a member — corporate status precedes salvation.  This view negates the personal call and responsibility that is involved in the Christian life.

Now most theological positions are more complex and I have caricatured the two extremes.  The varying theological positions are generally found in the middle ground.  Dr. Mouw in his article reflects this by saying that individual salvation is important but “that individual salvation is not enough.” (emphasis his)  He also mentions the centrality of the church in salvation.  I suggest that the answer to individual versus corporate lies very close to the center of this spectrum.

To begin, let us turn to the first post-ascension, and in many ways the archetype, conversion experience — the Day of Pentecost.  On that day one of the men in the crowd asks Peter “what should we do?” (Acts 2:37) and Peter responds:

Repent, and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ so that your sins may be forgiven; and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. (Acts 2:38)

The center of the conversion story is the recognized need, individual repentance and baptism leading to the indwelling of the Holy Spirit.

But note the full context in the story — It begins with the believers receiving and being empowered by the Holy Spirit. (Acts 2:4)  When the crowd mistakes their divine empowerment for inebriation (Acts 2:13) Peter preaches a sermon (Acts 2:14-36).  Only then comes the question about what they should do.  And the response includes baptism.

For those of a Reformed bent you probably caught where I am going with this, but for those who are not as familiar with it, the Reformed view of the marks of the church can be expressed like this:

Hence the form of the Church appears and stands forth conspicuous to our view. Wherever we see the word of God sincerely preached and heard, wherever we see the sacraments administered according to the institution of Christ, there we cannot have any doubt that the Church of God has some existence, since his promise cannot fail, “Where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them,” (Matth. 18: 20.)  [Calvin, Inst. 4.1.9]

The repentance and conversion experience are bracketed by the Word preached and the sacraments administered.  The individual is buttressed and supported by the corporate.

And what happens?  “And day by day the Lord added to their number those who were being saved.” (Acts 2:47b)

The interplay of the corporate and individual is remarkable.  The core of the experience is individual — you must repent for yourself.  But the initiative belongs to God in the empowering by the Holy Spirit that produced a sermon that with the Spirit’s touch convicted those that heard it such that they were “cut to the heart.” (Acts 2:37a )  The first Great End of The Church: The proclamation of the Gospel for the salvation of human kind.  But the story does not end there because with individual repentance comes the sacrament of baptism that produces new believers that are added to “their number,” that is the New Testament Church, daily and share the breaking of the bread.

Empowered by God the Church supplies the preaching of the Gospel that leads to individual repentance which through the sacraments bring those individuals into the Covenant Community that is the Church.

In fact, in John Calvin’s thinking, salvation through election and the Body of Christ found in the Church were inseparable and each presumed the other.

Sometimes when [the Scriptures] speak of the Church they mean the Church as it really is before God – the Church into which none are admitted but those who by the gift of adoption are sons of God, and by the sanctification of the Spirit true members of Christ. [Calvin, Inst. 4.1.7]

I won’t repeat the argument here that I made in my last Calvin post, but the essence is that if salvation is the act of adoption by God into His family then the Church and Salvation are two sides of the same coin.  It reverses Cyprian’s statement so that “Outside salvation there is no Church.”

Now I won’t pretend that either Scripture or the writings of John Calvin are totally clean cut on the issue.  There is the story of Paul and the jailer in Acts 16:25-35 where the jailer, after the earthquake, asks what he must do to be saved.  And the story of Peter and Cornelius in Acts 10 where Cornelius has a vision and sends for Peter.  In both cases there is a divine prodding, earthquake and vision, and there is a proclamation of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.  There is also a baptism of those present after hearing the Gospel proclaimed.  The nature of the repentance or individual acceptance of the good news is a bit murkier.  It is clear that in both cases the head of the household has an individual conversion experience.  But the result is the baptism of the whole household.  It is left as an exercise for us, the readers, to decide if all members of the household had an individual conversion experience or if the repentance of the head of the household, and maybe some others, was enough.  I won’t pursue that any further except to affirm that at a basic level there was the pattern of divinely assisted proclamation of the gospel, some level of individual repentance, and the inclusion of multiple individuals into the Covenant Community through baptism.

From another perspective, Calvin includes in the Church Invisible, the true church known only to God, individuals who are not part of the visible church body but who have none-the-less not rejected Christ or the Church. (Inst. 4.1.9)  While this might argue against the need for the role of the Church and the possibility of isolated individual salvation, remember that Calvin is viewing this in the context of the Church Invisible.  Community and salvation form an indivisible union.  From a practical standpoint, and from my reading of the Institutes, this represents a particular moment in time and does not necessarily speak of the conversion which came before or the Christian life that is to follow.  And of course, this all ultimately falls in the realm of the Sovereignty of God and His perfect will.

It is probably also necessary to acknowledge that the idea of “individual salvation” takes on a nuance for the Reformed side that is not part of the view of much of the rest of the Church.  This difference is not a major issue for the discussion here where the focus has been on individual salvation in the sense that salvation comes to each of us individually apart from whatever role the wider community plays in the process.  Outside Reformed circles the “individual” nature of salvation also includes the idea that there is an individual choice in accepting salvation based on our human free will.  The Reformed view is that our condition is far enough corrupted by our sinful nature that left to ourselves we can not make the free choice for salvation and God must do that for us.  So while God saves each of us individually, as opposed to a chosen nation of the Old Testament, we can differ over what role an individual can play in that salvation.

So in summary, what scripture gives us as examples of salvation in the New Testament church is the necessity of the corporate component and the individual part, but neither is sufficient by itself.  The church’s ministry of Word and Sacrament are the foundation on which in individual receives salvation — the Word to convict and the Sacraments to affirm.  It is not individual salvation or corporate salvation but individual salvation through the corporate presence.

Calvin 500 Celebration: Thoughts On The Linkage Of Theology And Polity — Part 3: Election Leads To Covenant Community

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from Wikimedia Commons

Still a community is asserted, such as Luke describes when he says,”The multitude of them that believed were of one heart and of one soul,” (Acts 4: 32) and Paul, when he reminds the Ephesians, “There is one body, and one Spirit, even as ye are called in one hope of your calling,” (Eph. 4: 4). For if they are truly persuaded that God is the common Father of them all, and Christ their common head, they cannot but be united together in brotherly love, and mutually impart their blessings to each other. [Inst. 4.1.3]

For John Calvin the conclusion is inescapable:  If humankind was incapable of doing anything, anything at all, to save itself because of the taint or corruption of Sin, and if some are saved for eternity, then it must be the Sovereign God that has saved us.  On the one hand this is nothing new for this argument can be found back at least to Augustine.  But in the climate of the 16th century and the Protestant Reformation Calvin was the major proponent and the doctrine of election may be his most famous, or infamous to some, teaching.

But the concept of predestination is only the start of a very important logical chain, not the end-all of Reformed thought.

As the scripture quote at the top says, with our election by God comes not just salvation for eternity but adoption.  God is the “common Father of them all” because in election comes adoption.  And if adopted, than we are all part of God’s family, the Body of Christ with “Christ as their common head.”

Hence the Church is called Catholic or Universal, (August. Ep. 48,) for two or three cannot be invented without dividing Christ; and this is impossible. All the elect of God are so joined together in Christ, that as they depend on one head, so they are as it were compacted into one body, being knit together like its different members; made truly one by living together under the same Spirit of God in one faith, hope, and charity, called not only to the same inheritance of eternal life, but to participation in one God and Christ. [Inst. 4.1.2]

To collapse this chain down, if predestination then the Church.  There can not be one without the other, at least in Calvin’s reasoning.  The two are inseparable.  Calvin speaks of the Invisible Church:

Sometimes when [the Scriptures] speak of the Church they mean the Church as it really is before God – the Church into which none are admitted but those who by the gift of adoption are sons of God, and by the sanctification of the Spirit true members of Christ. In this case it not only comprehends the saints who dwell on the earth, but all the elect who have existed from the beginning of the world. [Inst. 4.1.7]

And a little bit later Calvin says something very interesting about the Invisible Church:

The Church universal is the multitude collected out of all nations, who, though dispersed and far distant from each other, agree in one truth of divine doctrines and are bound together by the tie of a common religion. In this way it comprehends single churches, which exist in different towns and villages, according to the wants of human society, so that each of them justly obtains the name and authority of the Church; and also comprehends single individuals, who by a religious profession are accounted to belong to such churches, although they are in fact aliens from the Church, but have not been cut off by a public decision. [Inst. 4.1.9]

So if I understand Calvin’s words in this translation, the invisible Church is not just those that attend, but single individuals that do not attend but have at one time accepted Christ and have not subsequently rejected Christ.  If that reading is correct, this has very powerful implications I will come to in a moment.

Taking the logic chain even further we are confronted with other realities that must follow from this conclusion.  The Church is not just like a family — it is a family in God.  Not only can we not chose our family members, we can not even chose our own family ourselves.  We are placed in the Church and those around us in the church, whether we like it of not, are given to us to care for each other as charged by God and guided by Christ.

So as we consider Calvin’s doctrine of the Church, what are the implications for the Church and our polity?

One implication is that like it or not, we belong to each other.  And this is not belonging in the sense of seeing each other every Sunday morning for an hour, maybe 65 minutes if the preacher goes long.  This is belonging in the sense that those around us are truly brothers and sisters in a divine family that each of us has been adopted into through no merit or decision of our own.  The responsibility descends from God — as He has shown his care for us we need to show that care for those around us.  And it is an awesome responsibility because, whether we agree or disagree, whether we like each other or not, we are family together.

But the quote above about single individuals really shook me.  The implication is that there are those around us that are part of the Invisible Church yet are not part of a local congregation — And we have no way of being for sure short of their outright rejection.  The conclusion is that there are a bunch more people around us that we need to treat as brothers and sisters in Christ.  Yes for the sake of the Gospel and because all humans contain the image of God we should not mistreat or dishonor any other individual.  But beyond that there are others around us who are part of God’s family.

While many have considered Calvin’s model for congregational care in Geneva, the regular visitation by the elders to determine the spiritual health of each household, as controlling and prying, in Calvin’s view of the Church it was a proactive care of his spiritual brothers and sisters.  In our “my business is none of your business” modern western culture how many Presbyterian and Reformed churches send out elders to visit their whole congregation on a regular basis.  My church does it every few years, far to infrequently, but I was privileged to be serving on session one time when we did do it.  I will tell you that it was a very inspiring and meaningful activity to go out and get to know these individuals in their own home, one that has brought me closer to them in a way that seeing them on Sunday morning never could.  As the elder making the visits I was truly blessed.